Global Nerdy

Creative Commons photo by Rob Tiggelman. Click the photo to see the source.

After the release of the first-generation iPhone a little over seven years ago (June 29, 2007), the mobile industry would never be the same again. Sure, there were some naysayers who said it would never take off:

but in the end, the iPhone not only redefined what a smartphone was, but helped drive the convergence of mobile computing, wireless, and the internet, which in turn helped change the telecom industry’s business model from a voice-based one to a data-based one.

We’ve seen Apple’s long shadow in a couple of bits of recent news as well…

In the enterprise: The Apple/IBM partnership

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Apple CEO Tim Cook

We’ve covered this before, but it’s worth mentioning again, as it means that Apple’s iDevices — which have somewhere in the area of 90% penetration in the enterprise already — are getting paired up with IBM’s business services and big data expertise.

On the higher end: Samsung

If you wanted to get an idea of how fierce the competition between Samsung and Apple is, you need only to watch Screen Envy, Samsung’s latest ad:

Many of Samsung’s ads poke fun at Apple users and devices, but this one’s a little different. This time, the target of their fun-poking is the iPhone 6, which not only hasn’t been released, it hasn’t even been announced. There’s been word about Apple asking manufacturers to get ready for a record-breaking initial production run of iPhones in new sizes and the usual set of reports from reasonably reliable sources, but there’s still no confirmed list of features nor is there a release date.
That’s how competitive the mobile device industry is: you have to pre-emptively advertise against competitors’ products that don’t even yet exist.

On the lower end: Xiaomi

Xiaomi (pronounced “SHAO-mee”) may be a non-entity here in the U.S., but they’ve been called “The Apple of China”. The comparison is an apt one in many ways, not the least of which is that they’re a threat to Samsung — just from the lower end of the pricing spectrum. The underlying tech in their latest products can easily hold their own against Apple’s and Samsung’s flagship devices, and China alone can provide them with enough customers to make them a big player. Their devices are also cheaper than Samsung’s, which may be a threat as they expand beyond China and into the world market. As Business Insider’s Steve Kovach observed:

…that’s a big problem for Android manufacturers like Samsung. Apple has a great mobile ecosystem with iOS that you can only get on iPhones and iPads, but there isn’t a big difference between what a Samsung Android phone can do versus a Xiaomi Android phone. So, why spend twice as much when you can get a high-end gadget that does the same thing for half the price?

Here’s Xiaomi’s most recently-announced phone, the Mi4, which looks suspiciously like an iPhone, right down to the metal body and chamfers on the edges:

And if that weren’t enough copycattery, here’s their tablet, the MiPad (yes, you read that right: MiPad). It does boast graphics chips on par with an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 under the hood, but that hood looks oh-so-familiar:

The Apple-aping at Xiaomi doesn’t just stop at the products. Like Apple, their marketing points out their attention to design and detail. Their CEO, Lei Jun, is a bit of a Steve Jobs fan and according to Wikipedia “carefully cultivates a Steve Jobs image, including jeans and dark shirts, and Jobs’ style of product announcements.”

He’s even gone so far as to “borrow” this old “Stevenote” trick at a recent presentation:

Photo from Sascha Pallenberg’s Twitter account. Click the photo to see the source.

It hasn’t even been a decade since the world of telecommunications got revolutionized by the convergence of the internet, mobile computing, and wireless. For the longest time, mobile carriers resisted the change, concerned that a world of smartphones and apps would disrupt their business models and networks. If you look at the numbers, they appear to have adapted quite handily.

A handful of years ago, mobile phones’ primary use was voice calls, and hence your voice minutes were the precious metered commodity and data (then largely used for texting) was unlimited. Smartphones — and more accurately, their apps — flipped that usage pattern, and mobile carriers flipped their billing model in response, offering unlimited voice calls and putting a meter on data.

As technology consultant Chetan Sharma observed in his US Mobile Market Update Q1 2014 report, data’s share of carrier ARPU (average revenue per user) has been climbing steadily and now accounts for more than half their revenue:

Click the graph to see it at full size.

You may be surprised to note that the US was the seventh nation to hit the point where more than half of mobile carrier revenue comes from data. Japan, who’ve been using mobile phones for more than voice for far longer than we have, lead this category, with 70% of their carrier revenue generated from data.

Re/code’s Ina Fried points to a recent Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) report that says that of the big US carriers, Verizon made the most of this transition, with the fewest customers on an unlimited data plan, and the largest share of customers paying more than $100 a month. She included a table of CIRP’s data showing the US mobile carriers’ average monthly bill; we took that data and turned it into two graphs. The first divides the bills into three price segments:

• $50 and under/month
• Between $50 and $100/month
• Over $100/month

Click the graph to see the data source.

The second graph is a little more granular, with the following price segments:

• Under $25/month
• $25 – 50/month
• $51 – 100/month
• $101 – 200/month
• Over $200/month

Click the graph to see the data source.

Some observations based on the data:

• The smaller carriers live off the cheapest segment of the market, making over 80% of their mobile billing revenue from customers paying $50/month and less.
• The big 4 carriers — AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile — make about 40% of their mobile billing revenue from customers paying between in the $51 – $100 range.
• The largest 3 carriers make most of their mobile billing revenue from customers who pay over $100/month.
• Verizon is making money off the high-rollers, with 15% of their mobile billing revenue coming from people who pay over $200/month.

Click the image to see the data source.

Chetan Sharma says that with US mobile services growing these ways in Q1 2014:

• 4% quarter over quarter, and
• 23% year over year,

…it’s expected that the US will become the first country to cross the $100 billion mark in mobile data service revenue, with continued growth expected as more businesses rely on mobile technology and services to generate revenue.

It’s good to be a mobile carrier.

Recommended reading

• Re/code: Mobile Carriers Charging Differently, But Still Finding Plenty of Ways to Make Money
• Chetan Sharma: US Mobile Market Update – Q1 2014

How goes the competition between Samsung, the biggest Android device vendor, and Apple? Well, in May, the iPhone 5S outsold the Galaxy S5 by 7 million units to Samsung’s 5 million. To counter Apple’s Beats offering (which Khoi Vinh suggests is about being able to offer well-made and fashionable audio accessories at scale), Samsung launched their “Level” family of high-end headphones and speakers. To counter Apple’s HomeKit and Google’s Nest, they’ve been talking to SmartThings about acquiring them.

After the announcements about the upcoming Android L (the next version of Android; the current one is K) and the Material design language, Google have been busy. They’ve spending several hundred million dollars in a big marketing push to sell Android One phones in India, adding support for Android Wear custom watch faces, designing fonts that look good and are readable on all manner of devices, and updating the Google Play Store with a beautiful new UI that’s a little closer to the specs in the Material design language.

In non-Samsung Android news, LG announced the G3 Beat, a mid-range version of its flagship G3 smartphone.

How about that Amazon Fire phone? It seems to be an Amazon shopping device that just happens to act like a smartphone, and its first ad seems to have confirmed many suspicions:

BlackBerry are saying “better late than never” with the announcement of their assistant technology for Blackberry 10.3: BlackBerry Assistant. Even Microsoft’s Cortana shouldn’t worry about this one.

And finally, on the general mobile accessories front, there’s GoTenna’s messaging gadget, which works even “in the middle of nowhere” where you can’t get a signal. In New York magazine, Kevin Roose asks an interesting question: Does anyone outside Silicon Valley even want a smartwatch? Keep in mind that once upon a time, mobile phones — never mind smartphones — seemed frivolous, not vital.

Bottom photo by @darth.

On Tuesday, Apple and IBM announced their partnership to “transform enterprise mobility through a new class of business apps”, combining Apple’s iOS ecosystem with IBM’s big data and analytics capabilities. According to Apple’s press release, the promised outcomes of this partnership are:

• a new class of more than 100 industry-specific enterprise solutions including native apps, developed exclusively from the ground up, for iPhone and iPad;
• unique IBM cloud services optimized for iOS, including device management, security, analytics and mobile integration;
• new AppleCare® service and support offering tailored to the needs of the enterprise;  and
• new packaged offerings from IBM for device activation, supply and management.

Horace Dediu, on his blog Asymco, made this observation about this partnership in light of both companies’ histories and transformations:

This dramatic turnaround–Apple moving to a device leadership position and IBM moving to a service leadership position–created the conditions for today’s announcement of a strategic partnership–an event which is astounding to those who witnessed the 1980s and 1990s. Were it not for the tenacious independence of Apple and the business model agility of IBM, neither company would be around today to leverage one another.

Over at ZDNet, Larry Dignan asks: In IBM and Apple’s wake, what will team Android do? He quotes a Forrester analyst: “Seek partnerships that offer a credible alternative” and suggests that Google and Samsung would team up and partner with Accenture and HP, both of whom would be reluctant to become an Android-only consultant given how deeply iOS has made its way into the enterprise already:

He believes that SAP and Salesforce would prefer not to get involved with such an alliance, and that Oracle, who believe that Android ripped over Java in building their platform, would hope that Android fails in the enterprise.

In light of the announcement, BlackBerry shares fell by more than 10%. In its defense, Blackberry released an email statement saying that Apple and IBM’s partnership “only underscores the ongoing need for secure end-to-end enterprise mobility solutions like those BlackBerry has delivered for years,” and as the “clear leader” in the market, “enterprises should think twice about relying on any solution built on the foundation of a consumer technology that lacks the proven security benefits that BlackBerry has always delivered.”

Our reaction to that last statement:

It’s been noted how terrible Satya Nadella’s letter to Microsoft’s employees about the upcoming layoffs was. Stephen Elop — the guy who left Microsoft to run Nokia into the ground and then return to Microsoft triumphantly as the Executive VP of Devices and Services —  wrote a matching company-wide email that pertained specifically to the Devices and Services division, which would undergo “an estimated reduction of 12,500 factory direct and professional employees over the next year”.

It begins with this salutation:

Hello there,

Really? “Hello there?” “Hello there” is a suitable opener for an announcement such as “The restrooms on the 4th floor are out of commission today” or “The email servers will be down for an hour tomorrow”. It is completely inappropriate for a memo that essentially says “We’re firing 12,500 of you…and it could be up to a year before you find out if you’re one of them.”

Rodney Buike, who used to work with me on Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Team, pointed me to this article in CITEworld that features a photo of Yours Truly. It’s from July 11th, and it’s about Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s July 10, 2014 company-wide email, titled Starting FY15 – Bold Ambition & Our Core:

The photo accompanying CITEworld’s article is of Yours Truly, and was taken in September 2009, when Microsoft Canada hired Kris Krug (who always takes excellent pictures, especially of me) to get photos of the evangelism team outside the Vancouver edition of the TechDays Canada 2009 conference. They could’ve used the many photos that Microsoft provided along with Nadella’s letter, but for some reason, they went with the photo of the Microsoftie with the accordion making a smoochie-face.

My best guess is that the image of someone in a bright orange Microsoft shirt (which I loved) playing accordion reflected the message in Nadella’s email: a new, different, unexpected Microsoft, committed to a change in direction and being “the best place for smart, curious, ambitious people to do their best work”. I can get behind that.

What started as gdgt founder and former Engadget editor Ryan Block’s attempt to cancel his Comcast service turned into a maddeningly excruciating and even Monty Python-esque back-and-forth with a tenacious support rep who stuck to his script and hemmed, hawed, evangelized, and did everything he could to get Block to cancel the cancellation. Realizing after about ten minutes that he was in for a long phone call, Block had the presence of mind to record the conversation. Here’s the recording, which captures the last 8 minutes and 14 seconds of the opera of obstruction:

Here’s how Block annotated the recording:

Please note: this conversation starts about 10 minutes in — by this point my wife and I are both completely flustered by the oppressiveness of the rep.

So! Last week my wife called to disconnect our service with Comcast after we switched to another provider (Astound). We were transferred to cancellations (aka “customer retention”).

The representative (name redacted) continued aggressively repeating his questions, despite the answers given, to the point where my wife became so visibly upset she handed me the phone. Overhearing the conversation, I knew this would not be very fun.

What I did not know is how oppressive this conversation would be. Within just a few minutes the representative had gotten so condescending and unhelpful I felt compelled to record the speakerphone conversation on my other phone.

This recording picks up roughly 10 minutes into the call, whereby she and I have already played along and given a myriad of reasons and explanations as to why we are canceling (which is why I simply stopped answering the rep’s repeated question — it was clear the only sufficient answer was “Okay, please don’t disconnect our service after all.”).

Please forgive the echoing and ratcheting sound, I was screwing together some speaker wires in an empty living room!

I’m impressed at the fact that Block stayed calm through the exchange. The stubbornness that the support guy shows is enough to make you want to reach through the phone lines and throttle him, and after this audio posting went viral, Comcast have announced that they’re looking into the matter:

COMCAST STATEMENT REGARDING CUSTOMER SERVICE CALL

We are very embarrassed by the way our employee spoke with Mr. Block and are contacting him to personally apologize. The way in which our representative communicated with him is unacceptable and not consistent with how we train our customer service representatives. We are investigating this situation and will take quick action. While the overwhelming majority of our employees work very hard to do the right thing every day, we are using this very unfortunate experience to reinforce how important it is to always treat our customers with the utmost respect.

Having worked at organizations that have been incredibly wrong-headed about metrics and their use, I know where the service rep’s tenacity is coming from. In this job market, and especially as a phone service rep — where you’re recorded for “quality purposes” — you don’t risk losing your job by engaging in unsanctioned behavior, and you don’t go off-script. His behavior is extreme, but when you look at what he’s paid to do, he’s merely following the directive he was given: to retain customers. There’s likely a culture, if not a bonus, that promotes this behavior within Comcasts’s CSR pool.

Listen to the call a couple of times, and you’ll notice the bag of verbal and psychological tricks that the service rep uses: repetition, deflection, harnessing loss aversion, bait-and-switch. The skill with which he obstructed Block is impressive; I’d be willing to be that prior to the recording of his call going viral, he was actually hailed as an example and “hero” to his fellow phone-drones in the service rep pool.

If he loses his job at Comcast, he could parley the recording into a job opportunity at a brokerage and position himself as a salesman like the one Vin Diesel plays in this scene from Boiler Room: